Lornshillht

lornshillht

Hi, I’m still lornshillht on the web but not in real life any more. For a time I was HT (headteacher) of Lornshill Academy in Alloa, Scotland, until I retired in 2010. Prior to that I was HT at McLaren HS Callander, and also at Crieff HS in Crieff! And a bunch of other education jobs before that, including a full-time job in Edinburgh University from 2000-2003 as the Director of the Centre for Educational Leadership - a Centre for which my ambition outstripped my ability to attract enough funding and so I left to go back into a school ... Since I retired, I have done a stint as a volunteer with VSO out in Cambodia, and a bit or writing (more of that below), but for most purposes I have now reverted to being just plain old Danny Murphy, working as part-time senior teaching fellow at Edinburgh University, soon to retire from paid employment. Today I attended a session with Ewan McAndrew, Edinburgh University's wikipedian-in-residence. He had a bunch of useful resources, crammed a lot into the hour (though we ran out of time), then posted some great helpful start-up material on my Talk page (see above).. but it all looks a bit of overwhelming tonight so I'm just going to add a little bit more to this page... and in doing so create some text on which I can practise things like 'links' to other sites and to external sources, citation, including graphics and so on.

Family

I have a great family life, with four wonderful children who are all now grown up and have found partners who love and care for them and a wife with whom I am very happy to share my life. The first grandchild arrived recently.

Creative Writing

Since I retired I undertook a part-time Creative Writing M. Litt (when not working at Edinburgh!) at Stirling University to help me learn about writing that didn't need to be referenced all the time and carefully balanced against the evidence most of the time and generally written in a pretty dry 'explain everything' way. That is of course what teachers need to do, to 'explain', but explanation is death in a creative writing piece, I discovered, along with a lot of other interesting aspects of writing. To help sharpen my thinking and practice, I also attended a couple of excellent sessions with Bernard McLaverty and Claire Keegan. In January 2016, one of my stories, Rogey, won the Costa Short Story Prize. You can hear it read as an audiofile, if you prefer, here. I am currently trying to finish off the last few tasks of my present post (which has occupied most of my time since January), though I will still be a day a week at Edinburgh till October. My aim is to spend most of the time over the summer working up some of my other stories and in particular a book I have in mind which consists of a series of linked stories, 'Tales from Benhar'.

Educational Writing

One of the reasons for my retirement (there were several!) was to have some time to write a bit more about my take on school education, to distil what I had learned from my long years working in lots of different school contexts and in lots of different school jobs within the changing policy environments of public education. Some of the writing projects began way back when I was working full-time at the University, and here's the complete listing, starting with the most recent: